


tiger, tiger, burning bright

by Anonymous



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Alternate Universe - Monster Hunters, Families of Choice, Gen, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Past Character Death, Supernatural Elements, Zhang Yixing Cameo as a Means of Talking About Balance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:41:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26275045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Soonyoung sees the god of death in his dreams sometimes.
Relationships: Kwon Soonyoung | Hoshi & Xu Ming Hao | The8, Kwon Soonyoung | Hoshi/Wen Jun Hui | Jun, Wen Jun Hui | Jun & Xu Ming Hao | The8
Comments: 4
Kudos: 50
Collections: Anonymous, K-Pop Ficmix 2020





	tiger, tiger, burning bright

**Author's Note:**

  * For [figure8](https://archiveofourown.org/users/figure8/gifts).
  * Inspired by [promises to keep](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20926460) by [figure8](https://archiveofourown.org/users/figure8/pseuds/figure8). 



> dear figure8:
> 
> i was so excited and also incredibly intimidated to get you as my remixee! you're an author i really look up to and admire, and you deserve much better than what i can give you (unconnected character study vignettes) but unfortunately this is all i have to offer. thank you for all your stories, really, but especially for _promises to keep_ , a story ~~i am obsessed with~~ i think about a reasonable amount. you write with a beautiful tenderness that i can only hope to do justice.
> 
> thank you to L for reading this over for me, and Y for cheering me on! as always, much love.

Time passes differently here. Soonyoung wouldn’t even be able to carve notches in the soles of his boots like a movie cliché if he tried—iron is useless here, and he’d left all his knives behind anyways—but magic abounds. He stretches runes into thin red lines and loops them around his wrist not for each day, but for each new court he passes into.

A long time ago, someone taught him that to conquer anything, you must recognize it, and to recognize it you must know its name. This is the underworld, this is hell, but it is _Diyu_ , and before that, the _Narakas_.

For Soonyoung, time passes differently from all the rest too. Spirits spend millions, billions of years locked in their courts of hell, but it’s not a mistake that Soonyoung can cross them with relative ease.

Soonyoung enters the fifth court, and a new circle wraps around his wrist.

He can feel eyes on him as he crosses, scorching ground pleasantly warming the undersides of his boots with every step, unable to truly touch him. He’s not supposed to be here. _They_ make it abundantly clear, suffering souls pausing in their screaming and writhing to watch him approach the raised dais just beyond the gate.

Soonyoung has made many mistakes in his short lifetime. Coming down here was not one of them.

Assuming Yeomra-Daewang would be a large, imposing man in a grand throne, however, was.

There’s a thin, reedy man sitting behind what looks like an average office cubicle desk, feet kicked up on the table as he thumbs through a stack of papers. “Behind schedule, behind schedule again,” he moans, tossing the papers into the face of the first person in the long line of spirits queued up in front of his desk. “How am I supposed to get all these souls processed if there are always delays? You mortals and your inexplicable need for categorization. We used to just throw you into the fire and call it a day. Now there’s,” he grimaces, “ _paperwork._ ”

Soonyoung pushes his way to the front of the line, ignoring the grumbling of the souls he forces out of their spots. Yeomra’s beady eyes narrow at him when he makes it to the front. “And you! Do you know how many delays _you’ve_ caused me?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you,” says Yeomra. A file cabinet appears out of thin air, and Yeomra yanks a drawer open to pull a file out. “Traipsing through the underworld like it’s a fucking field trip or something. Distracting all the souls from their punishments. Messing up the flow of the soul channels. I have people that were supposed to be in _Tapana_ just hanging out in _Arbuda_!” He snaps the manila folder shut and shoves it into Soonyoung’s chest. “We’re in a time crunch here!”

Soonyoung catches stray papers before they can fall out of the folder, setting it back on the desk. “Sorry?”

Yeomra sighs, pressing his fingers into his temples. When he speaks again, the high-pitched, squeaky voice is replaced by something darker, more serious. Almost kingly. “You shouldn’t be here, Kwon Soonyoung.”

“I know,” says Soonyoung. “But I have a request to make.”

“A request? You think a mere mortal like yourself can just make requests of _me_?”

“A proposition, then,” Soonyoung amends. “A bargain.”

Yeomra stares at him, searching his face, before he sighs again. “You want the Xu boy,” he says, and it’s not a question.

Soonyoung bows, ninety degree angle low enough to touch his forehead to the desk. “Yeomra-Daewang, ruler of the underworld, judge of souls,” he says, a plea in and of itself. Let it never be said that Kwon Soonyoung did not know how to show respect where respect was due. “It was not his time.”

“What do you know about when his time was?” Yeomra scoffs. “Do you have any idea how intricate this schedule is?”

The sound of another file drawer opening, and then another thick folder slams down on the desk. Soonyoung lifts out of his bow. Yeomra flips through the file, pulling out a piece of paper and shoving it in Soonyoung’s face. “Look! Right on schedule. We don’t have _time_ for delays.”

It’s all in a script Soonyoung can’t read, unintelligible characters marching across the paper like little ants and making his head swim. “It wasn’t his time,” he repeats stubbornly.

Yeomra sets the paper back down, eyes piercing into Soonyoung again. “You are so determined to reverse fate,” he says, not unkindly. “You understand the concept of balance, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Then you also understand what you will have to give up in exchange.”

Soonyoung nods—he’d known before he’d even stepped through the portal to the underworld, a subconscious sort of knowing that set in long before he’d come to terms with the reality of what exactly he’d set out to do. But Yeomra holds up a hand. “I need you to really understand the weight of what you are asking for.”

“Do I not already?”

Yeomra shakes his head. “He carries the entirety of his clan’s sins on his shoulders. Their entire lineage. Every wrong they’ve ever committed, compounded and given to him to bear. The consequences he faces are unimaginable.”

The dread that sets in with understanding is quickly replaced by anger—anger that someone as kind as Minghao would be forced to bear so much. “That’s hardly fair to him,” argues Soonyoung.

“You mortals always talk about _fair. Fair_ doesn’t matter. What matters is balance,” says Yeomra. “Are you willing to bear that burden for him?”

Soonyoung sees the Jeoseung Saja in his dreams sometimes.

Once when his grandmother passes, the blurry outline of it still imprinted on the back of his eyelids the next day when he looks upon her still body. Once the night before a botched hunt with one of his family’s disciples—the sight of the gumiho’s claws plunged into her chest, blood spurting out of the wound a vicious crimson, is enough to plague his mind for the next few weeks, Jeoseung forgotten. Once after he makes his first kill, blood dribbling red rivulets down his arms as he holds the still-beating gumiho’s heart in his hands, marveling at the warmth of its steady _thump-thump-thump_. He goes to sleep that night and there is death all around him, grey fog sinking into his throat and threatening to burn him from the inside out.

Once the night that Xu Minghao dies.

They say you see the Jeoseung when _your_ time is up, but after a while it starts to feel like Soonyoung is the harbinger of death himself. Dream after dream after dream, and an empty sort of grief in the aftermath. He was told about this too—the hollowness in your chest that never seems to go away—but it’s different to experience it for yourself.

He doesn’t see the Jeoseung again after that, so he never brings it up to Junhui. He doesn’t see the point in it, anyways. Junhui has enough on his plate without Soonyoung’s problems. Soonyoung focuses on helping him stand up on his own two feet again.

It’s better if he leaves after this is all said and done. He’s doing Junhui a favor as a friend for now, but he was never meant to stay. The greatest gift you can give someone is their independence, and Soonyoung would never, ever want to strip anyone of that. Including himself.

But Junhui learns to stand up again, they’re both on even footing, and Soonyoung is still here. The more he thinks about leaving, the less he wants to do it, until the idea is nothing but the suggestion of a bad dream. Next to Junhui, he sleeps soundly.

“Thank you,” Junhui says one night, as they lie in bed together. There’s a thin sheen of sweat on his face, sheets pooled loosely around his bare waist, and Soonyoung thinks he’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. He wants to hold this moment in his heart forever. “For staying.”

There’s cotton inside his mouth. “It’s dangerous to hunt alone,” Soonyoung replies, in lieu of a better answer.

Junhui cups his face with a gentle hand, brushing a thumb over his cheekbone. “I know,” he says simply. “You don’t have to hide from me, Kwon Soonyoung.”

When Soonyoung was a child, too young to start formal training but old enough that no one looked twice if his father took advantage of his natural prowess to start teaching him a little early, a clan from China came to visit the Kwons. A sort of training retreat, as much as the meeting of two of the most powerful monster hunting clans in all of East Asia could be considered a retreat.

A marriage, too, although Soonyoung didn’t know that until after the deal was done, and only understood the accompanying implications much, much later.

Austerity was more than just a way of life for the Zhang clan, who traveled lightly and came with almost nothing on their backs. The Chois favored guns, but Soonyoung grew up around knives, and quickly grew enamoured with the bold array of melee weapons the Zhangs sported, the only flashy thing about them. He watched them spar with a fascination bordering on obsession, ignoring all decorum or protocol to get up close to see the action. It didn’t even occur to him that he wasn’t supposed to be there until he almost got his ear sliced off and sent the match in progress to a grinding halt.

The teenage boy who’d nearly cut off his ear whirled around to face him, mouth already open to yell. Soonyoung shrunk back in fear, bracing himself for the coming onslaught, when the other boy held up a hand. “ _Ge_ ,” he said, the single word stopping the first boy in his tracks.

He was smaller than the other, the boy who’d saved Soonyoung. Looked younger too. And yet, he’d brought someone who should by all means be his superior to heel just by using a term of deference.

Soonyoung looked at the _guandao_ he wielded as if it was an extension of his arm. The second son of the Zhang patriarch appeared unassuming, but even as a child Soonyoung couldn’t help but think that he should’ve been the scion instead.

The first son huffed crossly but backed down. The second son held out a hand to Soonyoung, one that he gratefully accepted, and pulled him up. “Are you alright?” he asked gently, his Korean crisp and clear.

“Yeah,” said Soonyoung, awed. ‘I’m okay.”

The boy smiled. “Good. What’s your name?”

“Kwon Soonyoung,” he answered immediately, still too starstruck to really notice how the boy smiled as if he’d already known.

“Nice to meet you, Soonyoung,” said the boy. “My name is Zhang Lei. Or, that’s one of them, at least.”

“One of them?”

Lei nodded. “A man can have many names, but that’s the one most people know me by.”

“What are the other ones?” asked Soonyoung.

Lei smiled. “Well, it’d be no fun to just tell you. How about we play a game, Soonyoung?”

Soonyoung nodded eagerly.

“I’ll give you until the end of our time here to find out my private name,” said Lei. “If you can tell me what it is before I leave, I’ll tell you a secret.”

Soonyoung pointed at the _guandao_ , focused singularly on the weapon in the way that little children often are. “Does it have something to do with that?”

Lei laughed, holding the _guandao_ up. “Oh, this? No, it’s a much more powerful secret than that. But I can show you how I use this later, if you’d like.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. But this isn’t as important as the secret, so you’d better start trying to learn my name before you start thinking about this.”

As a child, Soonyoung had known it was a diversion tactic, something to get him to stop bothering the real hunters, but he’d been too excited to really feel patronized. When he grew older, he’d spend years trying to figure out _why the hell_ someone like Zhang Lei would trust a child from another clan with his own private name.

Soonyoung spent the whole week snooping around, asking as invasive of questions as he could get away with under the guise of being a particularly curious child. It was proving harder than he’d expected—rather than trying to hide it from him, it seemed as if people just _didn’t know_ , even the innermost circle of the Zhang clan. The one time he thought he’d found it, after sneaking a peek at a yellowed record scroll and digging through his own family’s library for books on hanja, Lei had just shaken his head. _Zhang Jiashuai is another of my names, but not the right one. Keep trying._

It took Soonyoung up until the last day of the Zhang clan’s stay, right before they were to leave. In the end, it was quite simple. Zhang Lei was not only a skilled swordsman, he was an incredible spellcaster as well, and magic is strongest when it is both plainly honest and deeply personal. The runes he casted did not lie.

“Zhang Yixing.”

Lei smiled. “Clever boy. Here, have a tangerine.”

What Soonyoung had initially mistaken for gentleness, he’d quickly come to learn was rigid discipline and self-control. Lei picked one of the rocks at the riverbank that was still shaded by the trees and sat down, patting the neighboring rock. “Come sit. I’ll tell you the first secret.”

“First?”

“I have three for you today,” said Lei, making quick work of his tangerine peel. Soonyoung sat down next to him and watched his fingers pull the skin of the fruit off in a single strip, neat and easy to throw away later. “One thing you will learn when you get older, Soonyoung-ah, is that skill unlocks secrets, but secrets only beget more questions. I have a feeling that you will unlock many secrets in your lifetime. Today, you’ve earned three.”

Soonyoung didn’t really know what he meant, so he just started peeling his own tangerine. He could only pull off the skin in little chunks, nowhere near as efficient as Lei had been, but the end result was practically the same.

“One,” said Lei. “When you learn about the concept of balance as it applies to hunters, your clan elders, as mine did, will probably only talk about balance between this world and the spirit worlds. That is balance on a large scale. To the gods, your life is worth the same as a dog’s. As a—what do you call them here? As much as a gumiho’s, even.

“Of course, to us there is a difference. What balance really means is that there is a limit to how much death you can see before you lose it.”

“Lose what?”

“Your humanity,” Lei replied simply, before popping another section of the tangerine into his mouth. “There are more ways to die than just being killed.”

From his pocket, he pulled out another tangerine, starting the whole process of peeling it again. “I have more, if you want.”

Soonyoung couldn’t tell where he was hiding them—maybe his jacket had been magicked to hold an infinite amount of tangerines. He didn’t even know if you could do that. “No thanks.”

Lei gave him another one anyways, setting it down on the rock. “Two, names have power. Some have more than others.”

“How?”

“Self-recognition,” said Lei. “To conquer anything, you must recognize it, but to recognize it you must know its true name, the one it calls itself. More often than not, choice is an illusion, but in the case of names it is everything.”

Soonyoung nodded, understanding starting to dawn on him. _Yixing_ was what he found in the runes, after all. “What’s the third secret?”

Lei smiled, finishing off the last chunk of his tangerine. “Names have weight, too.”

As far as Soonyoung knew, no one in the Zhang clan was gifted with sight. Certainly, no one in Soonyoung’s own family could’ve seen the freak accident that killed the Zhang heir coming, leaving empty shoes for the second son to fill. But Soonyoung has always thought that Yixing should’ve been the scion, and now he’s starting to understand what _weight_ means, as well. To willingly give someone your name is to put your trust in them, and with trust inevitably comes a certain sense of indebtedness. If Yixing ever asked for a favor, Soonyoung would be in no position to refuse; not that he _would_ ask, but the suggestion is enough to keep Soonyoung from forgetting.

He never did find out exactly which character mapped to Lei. Without the tone, he was left with only the _pinyin_ , and there were endless possibilities. Lei for tired, maybe, or tear, or puppet. Lei for rib, lei for boulder, lei for flying squirrel, even.

Privately, Soonyoung’s always thought it was _lei_ for thunder. The thunder comes second, after all.

Soonyoung sees the Jeoseung Saja once more after that, the day the portal to the underworld opens. The form it takes this time is clearer than in past dreams, smoke outlined into billowing robes and a wide-brimmed hat. Almost kind.

Names have power, names have weight. Soonyoung isn’t sure which one he’s trying to give Junhui that day, as he sits up in bed before the clock even hits five in the morning and repeatedly traces the protection rune he favors on Junhui’s bare hipbone, over and over again. He can’t actually cast it—it would wake him up—but it gives him some comfort to think that maybe if he writes and rewrites _Kwon Soonyoung_ into Junhui’s skin enough times, it’ll stay with him. Maybe it’ll come close to sufficing for an apology.

What makes hunter unions so peculiar, especially those between two clans, is that sometimes to further solidify the bond hunters will swap surnames. Any good hunter understands the power of a name, and to give yours away is perhaps the most symbolic way to show trust. A marriage, after all, is more than just a legal binding; it’s spending eternity in each other’s debt, favors going uncounted.

He would’ve liked to do that someday—exchange surnames with Junhui. It goes against everything his family ever taught him about keeping a jealous vice grip on his independence, but Soonyoung thinks choosing to be connected to someone isn’t all that bad. Even the most independent people need a home to come back to.

Soonyoung traces the rune over and over again, finger ghosting over Junhui’s skin with _Kwon Soonyoung Kwon Soonyoung_ _Kwon Soonyoung._ He would give his name to Junhui a thousand times over, but he’s the one who’s in Junhui’s debt, more than Junhui will ever know.

Today was a good day—the fox heart locked away in a box in the trunk of Junhui’s car is testament to that, and Minghao’s prowess with spellcasting grows by the day. He’s come so far already, sometimes Soonyoung wonders what he’d become if he’d grown up in a clan—and then shuts down the idea. He’s here now, isn’t he?

They’re at the bar again, the end of their routine on good days like this. What’s out of the norm is that Junhui had stayed home after coming down with a sudden fever, half-delirious with pain. He’d still wanted to come out with them, had started putting on his boots again when Soonyoung wrestled him back into bed. _Don’t be stupid._

_You don’t be stupid_ , Junhui had said, words starting to slur. _You better take care of him while you’re out. No reckless shit._

_We’re just going to the bar. Minghao’s an adult, he doesn’t need me to baby him_ , Soonyoung had said, but he’d squeezed Junhui’s shoulder as an assurance all the same before tucking him in.

So it’s just him and Minghao today. Girls are already starting to flock around Minghao, drawn in by the glint in his eyes and the stories he weaves. Soonyoung already knows how this plays out—Minghao will go home with someone else tonight to fuck them, and Soonyoung will go home and think about fucking someone he shouldn’t.

He thinks about it an awful lot these days. The idea had popped into his head somewhere between the first time he and Junhui hunted together as full-fledged hunters, no longer under the watchful eye of his father, and all the times he’s watched Junhui throw knives with deadly accuracy since. Even covered in blood and guts, Junhui is beautiful with a blade in hand, a gorgeous, magnetic surety in his grip that Soonyoung never could look away from. If he’s deep in his cups, sometimes he’ll admit the roots of the idea sunk in long before he came out here to help Junhui and Minghao.

It was jealousy, at first, when even as a child Junhui handled knives with a prodigious ease that Soonyoung never had. Jealousy turned to respect, respect turned to admiration, and admiration turned to dreams almost worse than the ones with the Jeoseung Saja in them. There’s no word Soonyoung knows of that can adequately describe the feeling of seeing your best friend using his own two hands to wield blades with ruthless efficiency and feverishly wondering what those same hands would feel like against your skin.

Soonyoung was trained to kill monsters. He was never prepared to deal with the realization that hands made to be so deadly could be so gentle as well.

He looks up from the drink he’s nursing, late to notice there’s no one beside Minghao but him now. Minghao exchanges his empty glass for a freshly filled one, taking a long draught from it before setting it back on the counter with a sigh.

Soonyoung pauses. “None of them catch your eye?” he asks, trying for something casual.

Minghao shrugs. “You could say that.”

Minghao blooms like a flower in late spring under attention, but at his core he is still a private person. Soonyoung will never be able to read him like Junhui can, but he still knows when to push—or not. “Everything okay?”

Minghao presses his lips together, hand tightening around the glass in his grip. More than upset, he looks… afraid. The thought strikes fear into Soonyoung, too. “Hyung,” he starts, voice low. “You’ll take care of Junhui-hyung, right?”

Soonyoung blinks. “Of course,” he says. “He’s my best friend. I’ll always look out for him.”

“Good,” says Minghao. “He’s always so concerned with protecting me, sometimes I think he forgets to take care of himself. I worry what’ll happen to him if I’m not there.”

There’s a question on the tip of Soonyoung’s tongue, but he bites it back, pushing it under a mouthful of soju. “We all take care of each other, you know. We watch each other’s backs.”

Minghao’s lips quirk up into a wry smile, like he gets it. “I know,” he says softly. “But just keep an eye on him, alright? I won’t be around forever.”

Soonyoung wants to ask what he means. Later, he’ll kick himself for not asking, because he should have. But for now, he just rests a hand on Minghao’s shoulder. “Of course.”

“Good,” says Minghao, again. He stands up, stretching like a cat, and the distress from before is already gone. “Let’s go home. We can’t have too much fun without Junhui-hyung, can we?”

The blade didn’t rip Soonyoung’s cheek open, barely split the skin, but it was enough for Junhui to freeze. “Shit, Soonyoung,” he breathed, holding out a hand, poised to touch Soonyoung’s face where the blood beading out of the wound had started trailing red lines over the curve of his cheek. “I’m sorry, are you alri—”

Soonyoung grabbed Junhui’s wrist, twisting abruptly and using the force of it to flip Junhui over his shoulder. Junhui landed flat on his back with an _oof_ , the breath knocked out of his lungs, and Soonyoung didn’t waste any time in pinning him down.

“Softhearted,” crowed Soonyoung, once Junhui had stopped wriggling. He sat up taller, poking Junhui in the cheek. “That’s seven to six now.”

“I’ll show you softhearted,” growled Junhui, pushing Soonyoung and rolling them over. He started tickling Soonyoung mercilessly, all too aware of all his soft spots, until Soonyoung was crying from laughing too hard.

“Seven to six in _my_ favor,” said Junhui.

“Cheat.”

“Says the one who flipped me over when I was just trying to see if you were okay.”

“All’s fair,” argued Soonyoung. “The match wasn’t over yet. You just let your guard down.”

Junhui said nothing, just squished Soonyoung’s cheeks in his hand before rolling off of him with a sigh. For once, there was no one supervising their sparring match today—no one to yell at them for tussling on the ground, no one to chide them for being careless. Soonyoung liked it best like this, when it was just the two of them.

“You probably would’ve won anyways, even if I hadn’t slipped up with the knife,” Junhui admits. “I’m still not at your level.”

“You’re joking, right?” Soonyoung scoffs. “If it were just knives, you’d beat me a hundred times out of a hundred.”

“Not at the level I need to be, then,” Junhui amended, something resigned about it. Soonyoung propped himself up on his elbow, uncaring of the debris from the ground digging into his elbow, to look at Junhui.

Junhui stared off into the open sky, expression distant. “Is it selfish of me if I say I don’t want Minghao to learn from your father?”

“Why wouldn’t you?”

Junhui shrugged, as well as he could while lying down. “He’ll be a good hunter. A really good one, better than me for sure. But he’s still just a kid.”

“You’re just a kid, too,” said Soonyoung, but he sort of understood where Junhui was coming from. For as long as he’d known him, Junhui had always seemed to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Junhui shook his head. “He’s my _didi_. I just… I want to protect him for as long as I can.”

Soonyoung got up, dusting the dirt off his pants. “Let’s go again, then.”

“What?”

“Let’s spar again,” said Soonyoung, pulling Junhui up by the hand. “All in, no holds barred.”

“Aw, you know I’m shit at runes,” said Junhui.

“Then get better,” said Soonyoung. “Or get around it. Whatever you can do. You have a _didi_ to protect, right?”

Maybe the circumstances of Junhui and Minghao’s childhood excused Junhui’s protectiveness, but Soonyoung had no reason to fear for Junhui as much as he did. It wouldn’t be proper to say anything, but he could do this instead—hone his skills by practicing with him, like twin swords sharpening their blades on each other.

Soonyoung settled into a wide stance, gesturing for Junhui to make the first move. Junhui blinked, before the confusion gave way to a cattish smirk, and then he lunged.

Anything magic, Soonyoung had the advantage with—Junhui, for all his prowess with melee weapons, was still as terrible at spellcasting as he was on day one—but in close combat, it was anyone’s game. And so they began. It progressed like any other match until Soonyoung tried to slap an immobilizing rune on Junhui and Junhui just—disappeared.

Soonyoung stopped, looking around for him. Usually he could sense his presence without any difficulty, but— “Junhui?”

Nothing.

“Junhui?”

A split second later, and he found himself pushed flat against the ground, Junhui sitting on top of his chest and leveling a knife at his neck. “I win,” he said, grinning proudly.

“Junhui,” said Soonyoung, the sound of it so soft in his mouth, like a prayer. “Junhui.”

There’s a little temple near Soonyoung’s house, twenty minutes by walking if you take the backroad trails. Soonyoung has never been religious, but sometimes he goes up there and sits on the empty steps by himself to meditate.

It might just be thinking, but maybe it really is praying. Even if the gods do exist, Soonyoung doesn’t believe they care, but Junhui grew up with him and trained under his father, so he just has to believe it’s enough to keep him and Minghao safe.

Somewhere along the way, he’d learned that to cherish something you must know its name as well. He carries their names in his heart, Wen Junhui and Xu Minghao, the weight he chooses to bear for the rest of his life.

_It’s a sign of love_ , he’d told Junhui. _Teaching someone how not to need you anymore._

It’s a sign of love, too, to be set free and to still choose to stay.

Soonyoung had his first kiss at sixteen. Lee Seokmin was the son of the man who sold the best fruit at the farmer’s market, and Soonyoung can still visualize his smile when he closes his eyes—open, bright, with nothing to hide.

That summer was a lazy one. It was his second summer as a full-fledged hunter, which meant no more grueling dawn-to-dusk training, but his sister was occupied with talks between their family and another, which meant assignments for the two of them were sparse. Despite his protests, Soonyoung wasn’t experienced enough for solo missions, and no one else could spare a partner even if he wanted to learn how to hunt with someone new, and so, for the first time in his life, he found himself with largely nothing to do.

So he would walk down to the farmer’s market and find something to do.

At first it was just wandering the stalls and looking for something to eat. Then he had seen a boy at the fruit stand helping an old lady pack oranges into her bag and wandered over, intrigued.

“It’s a bit late for orange season, is it?” he asked, letting a hand ghost over the tops of the oranges all packed neatly into the stand. “But they still look so good.”

“Family secret,” said the boy, smiling broadly. “I guarantee they taste just as good too, but we have other fruits that are actually in season.”

Soonyoung shook his head. “I’ll just get an orange. How much?”

“For you?” The boy picked out the best-looking of the oranges and held it out towards Soonyoung. “I’ll give it to you for free if you tell me your name.”

Soonyoung learned two things that day: one, Lee Seokmin was not new in town, Soonyoung had just never met him before then, and two, he wasn’t actually supposed to give away fruit for free.

“My dad’s terrible at counting, he won’t notice,” Seokmin said dismissively. Soonyoung pulled the orange apart into two, offering Seokmin the other half. The juice was sweet on his tongue. Seokmin was right—it did taste just as good.

Every weekend after that, Soonyoung made a show of browsing the other stalls after Seokmin teased him about coming down to the farmer’s market just for him. He always ended up at Seokmin’s stand, though, sharing whatever fruit Seokmin deemed to be the best this week. It was a nice change of pace to not have to think about hunting, or engagements, or finding new partners for a few hours each week. Seokmin was not a hunter, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have magic of his own.

The weeks went by, and Soonyoung lost track of how many times he came to see Seokmin. He certainly wasn’t thinking about how many weeks it’d been when they were sitting in the back of the stall, behind the stand, and he looked over to see orange juice dribbling down Seokmin’s chin. Seokmin grinned at him, wiping the liquid off with the back of his hand, and something grew warm in Soonyoung’s chest, separate from the summer heat.

_Oh,_ he thought, realization washing over him slowly. _Oh, I’ve felt this before_.

“You have some on your face too,” said Seokmin, reaching over to wipe it for him. Soonyoung froze up under the touch.

Seokmin’s eyes softened. “It’s okay, you know,” he said. “No one’s watching.”

“Someone’s always watching,” Soonyoung said quietly.

“Is it so bad if they are?” asked Seokmin. Vision narrowed to just him, the rest of the world fell away. “It’s not wrong, you know, to—”

“I know,” Soonyoung cut in before he could finish saying it. “It’s just.”

“Just what?”

Soonyoung couldn’t figure out an answer to that. He leaned over and kissed Seokmin instead.

Seokmin tasted like oranges. Soonyoung chased the sweetness of his tongue, hoping it would overpower the bitterness in the back of his own mouth.

Seokmin kissed back, patient as Soonyoung fumbled his way through. They kissed for what felt like hours, breaking apart for the last time as the sky started to grow dark. Sunset was quickly approaching, much faster than Soonyoung expected, and the realization that summer was coming to end was sobering. This was the last week of the farmer’s market for the season.

Seokmin grabbed his hand before he could stand up, keeping them hidden in the back of the stall for a moment longer. “I know we live different lives,” he said, as gently as always, “and I won’t ever understand what it’s like to grow up in a family like yours.”

Seokmin was the first person outside of hunter circles Soonyoung had felt comfortable really sharing with. They’d exchanged story for story, and Soonyoung sometimes found himself envying Seokmin’s simple home life and loving family. Everything seemed so much less complicated when your worth as a person wasn’t intrinsically tied to where you stood in the mess of relationships of a hunter clan.

“I’ll never understand,” said Seokmin, “but even still. I hope one day you will learn what it’s like to not be afraid. What it’s like to not need to hide. To be out in the open.”

Soonyoung’s sister is the best hunter he knows. Even when they hunted together, as partners with equal standing, he’d always felt like he was one step behind her, running to catch up. She’s the best mentor he’s ever had, because there is no teacher like practical experience, and with her, he got _lots_ of it.

Kwon Minkyung is next in line to be the head of the Kwon clan, and it is for this reason that her engagement was such a hotly debated topic among the clan elders. Whoever her future husband was, he had to be a skilled and capable hunter, enough to at least not hinder her, if not match her. He should be from a clan with good standing, but not high enough that he’d be too reluctant to give up his family name and take hers. He should be handsome, and willing to take care of children, and good at managing family affairs, and a whole other laundry list of qualities that the elders sought for their heir’s perfect husband.

It took forever to find the right guy, and Soonyoung remembers being stuck in that terrible limbo of not knowing when the last time he would hunt with his sister would be. “I’m not ready to lose you,” he’d admitted quietly one night, the most honest he’d ever be with her.

“You’re not going to lose me,” Minkyung had scoffed. “I’ll still be right here.”

But he had lost her, to someone who became not only her other half but her hunting partner. Her husband had, by taking her away, also taken away his hunting in a way. He was still a hunter, technically, but the lethargy of inactivity ate away at him.

He was sixteen when she got married. He’s nineteen, now, and there’s a sinking sense of dread in his stomach when his father calls him into his office, months after he’s returned home from helping Junhui and Minghao. More months of inactivity. He can’t stand it, but there’s something in his gut that tells him that this might just be worse.

“We’ve found a hunting partner for you,” says his father. Soonyoung’s taller than him now, but he still feels small.

He says it in the exact same tone he’d announced Minkyung’s new hunting partner with, and Soonyoung knew what that meant. “Just a hunting partner?”

Hesitation flickers over his father’s face for just a moment before disappearing. “A partner in more ways than one,” he amends.

Soonyoung sighs. “And you didn’t think to maybe, I don’t know, warn me ahead of time? I didn’t even know you were trying to pair me off this early.”

“I thought you’d be happy,” says his father, frowning. “You’ve been complaining about being stuck at home so much, I thought you wanted to get back into the field.”

“Not like this,” says Soonyoung. “Not if it involves a marriage. I can’t hunt with someone that I don’t love.”

“We’ve picked out a very nice girl for you,” his father says. “You could learn to love her.”

Soonyoung really tries, just to give his father the benefit of the doubt, to consider it. But when he visualizes it in his mind—tries to imagine some faceless girl next to him at the altar, by his side while they hunt—there is already someone else there. He shakes his head. “I couldn’t.”

“Why?”

His father’s expression is neutral, carefully so. Too careful. Soonyoung searches his face, looking for the slightest crack in his veneer. He finds it in the eyes: behind the fatherly concern is grim understanding, behind that is fear, and in the very back—disdain.

Soonyoung wants to laugh. He wonders what he spent all that time hiding it for if he was that obvious to begin with.

“You already know why,” he says, before turning to leave.

Minkyung finds him on the back porch, staring into the greenery like he could set it on fire with just his eyes. She tosses a sheathed knife at him. He catches it without looking, fingers curling around the covered blade.

“Gumiho in the neighboring town,” she tells him. “Let’s go.”

“Why me?” he asks, and it comes out more bitter than he meant. “Shouldn’t you be going with your husband?”

Minkyung comes to stand next to him, resting her elbows on the porch railing. “You were my partner before him,” she says idly, picking at her nails. “For old times’ sake, shrimp.”

Soonyoung scowls. “I’m taller than you now.”

“Doesn’t make you any less of a shrimp to me,” she says, pressing a second knife into his other hand. When she turns and walks away, Soonyoung follows.

She drives them to the town over and stands back from a distance as he hacks into the gumiho as gracelessly as possible. For all the poor ideas their father has regarding Soonyoung’s future, he always did give good advice, one example of which is this: every kill is personal, and should be taken as such. Using a knife is just the physical representation of how little distance actually exists between you and the monsters you kill, but it doesn’t matter what weapon you use as long as you put your back into it. It’s a sign of respect.

It’s a good reminder of your own mortality, too.

Soonyoung wrenches the gumiho’s heart out of its chest, the adrenaline draining out of him at the same gradual speed of the blood dribbling down his arm. Silently, he watches it throb in his hand. What a precious thing, and yet so fragile. He could so easily rip it to shreds right now.

Instead, he turns around and carefully deposits it into the box Minkyung’s already opened for him. “Thanks.”

Minkyung snaps the box shut. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Since we’ve hunted like this.”

“Few years now,” says Soonyoung. He wipes the blood off his knives with the old towel Minkyung hands him, sliding the blades back into their sheaths. “Do you love him?” he asks, non-sequitur.

Minkyung pauses, as if weighing her words. “You know Dad only wants the best for you, right?” A non-answer for a non-question.

Soonyoung snorts derisively. “If he did, he wouldn’t have tried to marry me off.”

“I never said he had good ideas,” Minkyung says lightly, “only good intentions.”

Soonyoung wonders what his father would’ve said if Soonyoung had outright told him exactly why he couldn’t marry the girl he picked out for him. “I’m not even convinced of that.”

“Fair enough, I guess.”

“Do you love him?” Soonyoung asks again.

“I learned to,” Minkyung says, after a moment. “He’s a good man and a good hunter. I do love him now, but I understand that you and I… our circumstances were different.”

_Circumstances_. Nice way of putting it. “As in, you had even less of a choice than I did?”

Minkyung shakes her head. “As in, I wasn’t in love with someone else.”

Soonyoung stops walking abruptly. There’s a tingling in his sinuses that’s all too familiar, and he cranes his neck to look up at the canopy of trees above, afraid that if he opens his mouth it won’t be words that come out. He closes his eyes. “Is there anyone in this goddamn family that doesn’t know, then?”

“Most people don’t,” Minkyung is quick to assure him. “Dad only knows because he trained both of you.”

“And you?”

When Soonyoung finally works up the courage to open his eyes again, Minkyung’s smile is sad. “You underestimate how well I know you. I was your partner first, too.”

He’s struck, then, by the sudden urge to run into her arms, like he’s five again and crying over his skinned knee. He drops into a crouch, hiding his face in his knees. “What gave it away?”

“You look at him like you fear losing him.” There’s a hand rubbing slow circles into his back. “You always were a bit of a scaredy cat, Soonie.”

“Am not,” Soonyoung mumbles, on principle. “I just—” he lets out a harsh sigh, rubbing his eyes. “I don’t know what to do. Do I even have a say in the matter? Everything’s already been chosen for me.”

The hand on his back stills. “You always have a choice,” says Minkyung. “If not, then you just have to create the options for yourself.”

“And accept the consequences.”

“That too.”

Soonyoung strikes his own name from the family register that night, before anyone else can do it for him. It feels like snapping one of his own heartstrings—more than the sharp pain of the moment, it's the phantom ache that hurts him afterwards. He always did take for granted what it meant to have a family.

He leaves the next morning.

Legend says that a god by the name of Hwanung, who was in charge of overseeing human affairs, was approached by a tiger and a bear with a request one day. The two animals wished to become human, and Hwanung agreed to grant their wish under two conditions: one, that they would subsist only off of a handful of mugwort and twenty cloves of garlic for a hundred days, and two, that they would stay inside a dark cave without seeing the sunlight for the same amount of time. The tiger and the bear both accepted the task.

Before the ordeal was over, however, the tiger ran away. The bear stayed faithful and was rewarded on the twenty-first day by transforming into a beautiful woman.

Soonyoung’s never cared for tradition or mythology, but this is one story he remembers. He hadn’t liked it as a child—how could tigers be weak?—but over time it’d become a game for him. _Tiger or bear_?

Was he a tiger or a bear when he left his family to go help Junhui? When he left Junhui without saying goodbye to save Minghao? When Junhui moved away after completing his training and Soonyoung just watched him go? Was it better to run away or stay behind—did staying behind mean running away, in its own way? Was it really so bad to run away?

Sometimes Soonyoung wonders if the tiger had given up not out of weakness, but instinct. If it had known that it did not actually want what it had asked for. What was so good about being human anyways?

The bear had ambition, but the tiger knew its limitations. Tiger or bear? Soonyoung is both. He asks for Minghao’s life back with an almost insolent greed, and yet he is too aware of the fact that he is not a god. He is not infallible. If he asks for something, there will be a price to pay.

And he is willing to pay it.

“Yes,” says Soonyoung, without a moment’s hesitation. “Yes. I’ll do anything. Just, please, let me bring him back first. Let me see him off.” _Let me see Junhui one last time._

Yeomra-Daewang sighs heavily. “I should’ve known not to expect any different,” he says, pulling out a new file and uncapping a pen. “You humans are such fickle creatures, and yet you are willing to sacrifice so much for each other.”

Soonyoung smiles. “That’s just love.”

Yeomra shakes his head, but says nothing. He signs a paper with a flourish, and when he holds it up, it disintegrates into the air. “The deed is done,” he says, gesturing to something behind Soonyoung.

Soonyoung turns around. When he sees the figure coming out of the mist, his heart leaps up into his chest, the fear of the past few weeks finally giving way to relief.

“Soonyoung-hyung?” Minghao says in a small voice, once he’s finally close enough that Soonyoung can see the confusion in his eyes. He looks so small like this, so young. Junhui had said, once, that Minghao would always be his little brother no matter how old he got. Soonyoung’s beginning to understand a lot of things, now. They may not have grown up together, but Minghao is his little brother too. He is still a child, and it is not his time yet.

Soonyoung stumbles off the dais in his rush to get to Minghao, grabbing Minghao’s wrist and reveling in the feeling of warm skin against his fingers. _Real. Alive._

“Hyung,” says Minghao, choked up, “why are you here—”

“Shhh, don’t worry about that,” says Soonyoung, pulling Minghao into a hug and rubbing his back. “We’re not staying here. We need to leave now.”

“We’re going?”

Soonyoung nods, stepping back but refusing to let go. He holds Minghao by the hand, squeezing once, twice. For as long as he can, he’ll hold on.

“Let’s go home, Minghao-yah.”


End file.
